This inaugural episode of A History of the Holocaust starts by defining the Holocaust as the systematic, state-sponsored murder of six million European Jews between 1933 and 1945. It agues that race-based antisemitism caused Europeans to falsely imagine Jews as a biological threat. At the same time, the Holocaust included the millions of other victims, such as the Sinti and Roma, people with disabilities, Jehovah's Witnesses, LGBTQ people, Slavs, and Soviet prisoners of war. The podcast introduces the perpetrator/victim/bystander/rescuer framework that will structure the series and makes the case for why this history still demands careful study: not as an inevitable catastrophe, but as the outcome of countless individual choices, at a moment when survivor testimony is fading and denial is resurgent. The show is hosted by Dr. Eric Paul Totten of the University of Arkansas. It is grounded in the work of scholars including Norman Goda, Christopher Browning, Ian Kershaw, and Deborah Dwork. The episode describes the direction of the series, first with the long European roots of antisemitism, before tracing the rise of the Nazi Party, the radicalization of persecution into genocide, and the unfinished reckoning with memory that continues today.